


peace on your wings

by TheBigCat



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Gen, POV Second Person, Yuletide Treat, paper cranes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21936952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBigCat/pseuds/TheBigCat
Summary: “One thousand is the tradition, I believe,” she says thoughtfully.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	peace on your wings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tangentti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/gifts).



> Your Sapphire and Steel prompt intrigued me, and I just couldn't help myself. Happy Yuletide!

The stewardess seizes your hands with an inhumanly strong grip, and you look up at her and she tells you, “the plane is about to crash, come with me,” in a terrifyingly matter-of-fact tone, and that's when you know that you're going to die.

She's passed you a couple of times this flight, her plain blue uniform sweeping by your seat. She has long, bright-blonde hair and a nice, if distant smile, but honestly you haven’t needed all that much so you didn’t pay her much attention. But now there are alarm bells ringing in your head for reasons you can’t pin down, and the plane’s gone more-or-less silent around you, and she’s looking at you like you’re the solution to all of her problems.

And really, all you can do at this point is get up and follow her.

She leads you forward – not exactly dragging you along, but solidly insistent and with a grip of iron too. Everything feels strange, fuzzy. The walls of the airplane aren't as distinct as they were only minutes ago, and you feel the wind from outside prickling at your face and freezing your skin and ruffling your hair. And there's  _ nobody else there _ . No passengers – the seats are empty, magazines and laptops and trays of food lying discarded, in some cases dropped on the floor. No other stewardess, either – just the one who's got you by the hand, looking as calm as anything, and you're beginning to suspect that she's not a stewardess at all.

And, as she pushes back the curtain and tugs you through into the cockpit of the plane itself; you realize that there's no pilot, and no co-pilot, either. The sky, through the glass of the window, is blue – but it's the wrong sort of blue. It's closer to the blue of the stewardess's dress – which isn't uniform-standard, now that you come to think of it – and the color's deepening as you watch, fading and flowing into an inky black that's somehow much, much darker than any night sky.

The buttons and dials on the abandoned, forgotten controls are lit up and blinking in dangerous-looking red-and-yellow patterns, but the stewardess seems utterly unconcerned with this as she lets go of your hand and takes the co-pilot's seat, before she snatches something off from where it's been stuck to the top of the pilot's wheel. She examines it as you stare at her, and then out the window, and then back through the galley and into the empty cabin.

You try to ask her what's going on, but she holds up a hand, not unkindly, to indicate silence, and then holds out what she's been examining. “Do you recognize this?”

You blink dumbly at it, and then – slowly, very slowly – nod. Of course you do. It's a crane, a paper crane – and a small one, at that, folded inelegantly out of scrap newspaper.

“Good,” she says, and casts a look out of the windshield. The sky outside is now pitch-black, and somehow –  _ somehow _ – it's growing darker by the second. For the first time, you see a flash of what could possibly be nervousness fall over her face, but it's quickly gone. She turns back to you, and says, “do you know how to fold them?”

You tell her no, because you don’t, and ask her what the hell’s going on and  _ sorry did she say plane crash? _

“A shame,” she says, ignoring your question. “You're going to have to learn quickly, then.”

She raises her hands and spreads her fingers wide like she's about to conduct a symphony, and all around the both of you, paper starts falling from nowhere. Perfectly square sheets of paper of every color and style, drifting down to cover the ground of the cockpit like snowflakes. Within seconds, there's enough of them to paper the walls of your entire apartment and still have hundreds left over.

You gape at her, and she smiles – a thin, mysterious sort of smile – and then she's sitting down on the ground next to you and crossing her legs gracefully and picking up one of these sheets of paper – grey and shiny, like a sheet of aluminum foil. “Watch carefully,” she says, and starts to fold.

At first, it's hard to pay attention – the plane is crashing, according to her, and there's the impossible amount of paper everywhere you can see and the darkness outside (which is getting even darker still) – but then it's hard to look away. She folds neatly and matter-of-factly; corners to corners, paper overlapping and flipping on itself. She creases with precision, holds it out to you after every step, and within minutes there's a tiny, perfect paper bird sitting in the palm of her hand, and she's tucking its beak down with her thumb and index finger. “Your turn.”

Fumblingly, you pick up the first paper square you can find, and start trying to mimic her precise motions. She folds another alongside you, hums softly and points out where you're going wrong. Your final crane isn't nearly as perfect as hers is, but she takes it and nods and sets it on the dashboard next to the original crane and the two that she's made already.

“Again,” she says – not a command, exactly, but said in the sort of tone that you'd wouldn't want to argue with.

You suppose that you should have expected that, with the number of paper squares currently flooding the cockpit. Silently, you pick up a lacy-patterned green square, and begin stutteringly folding your way through the motions once more. This one turns out even more crooked; one wing slightly longer than the other, and the beak won't quite fold down right. Nonetheless, it's added to the slowly growing collection of cranes on the dashboard. The stewardess is making them ten times faster than you are, somehow – now that she's not showing you how to do it, her fingers blur over the paper with uncanny accuracy and speed. You clear your throat, pick up another square of beautifully patterned floral paper, and ask her how many you need to make.

“One thousand is the tradition, I believe,” she says thoughtfully, which makes you stiffen and your eyes widen, because  _ hadn't she said that the plane was crashing?  _ She sees this, and gives you a kind, polite sort of grimace, and then tells you, “time is somewhat distorted at the moment. If we work fast, we should have just enough of it to finish.”

All right. Yes, fine, good, (that makes no sense whatsoever), but  _ why? _

“Well,” she says, “and, this is only a guess, but – I don't think that you want to die, do you?”

You don't. You really, really don't. Your breath starts to come in short as you realize just how fragile your own mortality is – breathing is suddenly immensely difficult – but you manage to get it under control somewhat.

She nods as if that explains everything. “Then we really should keep folding,” she says, and keeps doing just that. You hesitate for a second, but no more words seem forthcoming, so you just get back to it. There's nothing else to do, really.

Time  _ does _ seem distorted here, just like space – the wind is somehow whipping at your hair even more fiercely, even though the paper and the cranes aren't being disturbed in the slightest. She and you keep on folding cranes, and you're not sure if it feels like minutes or hours when you look up and you realize there's roughly two hundred of them now, scattered all over the dashboard and spilling onto the floor to mix with the unfolded squares. It's easy to tell which of them are yours and which of them are hers at a glance, although you think that you may be getting better at it, just a bit.

Outside, the sky is dizzyingly empty and bottomless, like how you imagine looking into a black hole would look like. And it  _ just keeps getting darker _ .

“Yes,” she says, not looking up from her current gaze. “There are quite a lot of them, aren't there? But not enough – we may need help.”

Help would be nice, you agree, but there's nobody else. The plane's empty,  _ completely _ empty.

But maybe not, because there are footsteps, all of a sudden, coming up from the back of the plane and down the corridor and suddenly there's a stern-faced man in the doorway, regarding your combined efforts with a cold grey gaze.

“Sapphire,” he says, addressing the not-stewardess. “Is it working?”

“Three hundred and two,” she says. “We're getting there. Why don't you lend us a hand?”

He makes a noise of displeasure, but comes to sit – somewhat uncomfortably – on the ground nearby the woman. He takes up a paper-square of his own and starts to fold. His movements are mechanical and stiff but he's just as precise as she is. You take a moment to look at them – grey and blue, stiff and effortlessly elegant, side by side, equally matched, equally different. Then you see the sky, and see how the endless abyss is starting to seep in through the glass and infect the inside of the plane, and you feel the metal creak and protest around you, and you resume folding at an almost frenzied pace.

The cranes continue to pile up. The two people in the room with you – you know now that they aren't staff, and they aren't passengers, and really, they might not even be human – fold and craft without speaking to each other, although occasionally they do glance at each other and exchange little microexpressions like they know what the other is thinking. They're closer to each other now, without you ever having noticed them moving. She’s leaning lightly on his shoulder, and he’s softened just a little bit and has his head tilted ever-so-slightly in her direction.

Time passes, or it doesn’t, or it does and it passes far too slowly and far too quickly all at once, and you're about to pick up another square of paper, but when you reach for one, there's nothing there. Just the cranes – hundreds of cranes that now surround you like the world's most papery avian menagerie in every color and pattern you could ever imagine. There's so many more than you've realized – much more than a thousand, you think. You look up at your two companions, and they're both standing now, regarding the scene, and eyeing you – still on the floor, your fingers raw and cut all over from the relentless folding – with unreadable expressions.

“Yes,” says the man, “yes. I think that will do for now.”

The woman smiles at you. There's a hint of warmth to it. “One thousand paper cranes. You have our congratulations.” She pauses, tilting her head to one side, and adds, “I'd advise you to hold on tight.”

Before you can have a chance to ask her what she means, there's a rush like a thousand year's worth of forgotten memories, and the glass at the front of the plane crumples and rips like origami paper, and the darkness beyond comes rushing in. Not like water – more like honey, thick and viscous. It sweeps through, catching all of the lovely, delicate paper creations up in its tide. They bob to the surface and are swept through – past you, through the doors, into the plane beyond – but you're not so lucky. It catches you and engulfs you and drags you down, wrapping itself around every part of your body. You gasp and you try to scream, but when you surface briefly, flailing wildly for dear life, the woman and her partner are gone like they'd never been there in the first place. And when you hesitate for just a split second too long, the blackness drags you back into its depths once more, and so are you.

And then you're falling, and then you're screaming, and maybe you're crying a bit, and then  _ impact _ . And you're dazed, and you can't breathe quite right, but there's sunlight on your face and a breeze dancing over your skin, and you open your eyes and the sky is so blue and so bright that you think you might actually cry.

You look sideways, and see that the wreckage of your plane is some distance away from you – close enough that you can see it and recognize it, but not close enough that you're in any danger. It's ruined, broken, completely ravaged. The odds of anyone surviving a crash like that are so low as to be completely nonexistent, and yet –

You sit up, and you feel several very light weights fall off you. There's something mildly sharp digging into your arm, and several more something poking at your legs. You look down to see, and your breath catches in your throat.

Around you and under you and on you, scattered like meticulously folded raindrops, are hundreds of vibrantly-colored paper cranes.


End file.
